This [What would Jesus drive? ad] is nonsense. We’re talking about our desires and putting them on Jesus. Jesus would take public transportation. Or he would take a plane. Depends on what the purpose is.

Simple thinking and high thinking. That’s what we should be.

Economics has got nothing to do with God. God sustains the whole world without the dollars, without the dinars, without the rupees. To even talk about it shows our ignorance of God. Economics has got nothing to do with it. God is above all this material crass. We should be talking about how God sustains the whole world. The elephants in Africa. The Iranians, the Afghanistanis, the Americans. That’s what sustains us.

I've got an example to give. As a Muslim . . . now I'm in real estate, and I know to buy a house in the United States, unless you're a millionaire, you can't buy it cash. You have to get a loan. Islamic . . . the religion of Islam prohibits giving and taking of interest, so communities have to become really creative about financing the house. To get around giving usage of interest, in California, the San Jose, Santa Clara area, about a thousand people, and of course, people out there have wages that we can't dream of, that they could afford doing that, and the only way they could buy a house is if a thousand of them got together and . . . we call it a committee. We have been doing this back home forever, where everybody pitches in $1000 a month. It's like a savings account. And whoever is first in line -- there's 1000 people -- you've got enough money to buy a house. And so by the time it's [number] one thousand's turn, you'll have a house paid for every month. And people are successfully doing that. They've got 140 people that pitch in whatever a month.

I'm just giving an example. And there are various other organizations that have gotten together, pitch in the money, and they're buying houses on a profit and loss basis instead of charging people interest. We just bought a Mosque based on that. Instead of the seller charging us interest we had him do a . . . do a profit, what his property may be worth in 5 years, once the loan is paid off, and based the sales price on that.

So the religious involvement in getting over the corporate . . . and making corporations socially responsible is a great idea.

What does history teach us? The standard of living in the world, health, everything else, has risen tremendously all over the world. All over the world. A rising tide raises all boats.

There are a lot of countries where I’ve been in where 20 years ago they were far better off than they are in now.

We have a mistaken notion that just because someone has a job on the border of Mexico and Texas they’re better off than they would have been back in their rural economy.

20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago life was much worse than it is today, worldwide.

You talk about opening up borders. Trade. You know which companies come in first? Seagram’s. Whisky, vodka. That’s the last thing those people need.

Coke. India does not have enough water to drink. It takes 6 bottles of water to make one bottle of coke and you paid 20 rupees for it when the water was free.

As leaders, you have to lead. I’m not saying take away our cars and my cars and all that stuff. But to say, Alzheimer’s was not known before. What you’re seeing is—it’s not quantity, you’re living 80 years, you’re living 15 in the nursing home. Quality is what matters. Quality of life has not got nothing to do with good clothes. Quality means you hug your child, not to put them in a babysitter’s home, or a foster home.

I have to come to the defense of corporations. Sure they’re lots of bad ones, but you’re absolutely right. The situation of the world of most of the world is much better than it was 50, 100 years ago. All we have to do is look at what Eastern Europe and Russia was like when they had communism.

Whatever you say about capitalism there’s nothing in the world that has ever been tried that’s better.

The idea that the condition of people is getting better throughout the world is really hard for me to reconcile with what I read about what’s happening in Africa where AIDS is decimating just a huge, a quarter of the population in different places. A QUARTER of the population has a serious life threatening disease? . . . I just can’t believe that the world is getting better.

The fact that America has done well with capitalism and the fact that we’re so proud of it doesn’t mean that the rest of the world is doing well, is still using that system entirely. There’s lots of countries that have universal health care and they’re socialist.

When we say that corporations are greedy. I work for corporations. Of course they’re greedy. I don’t have any rights. I’ve lost my rights as a . . . I don’t have the same rights that my father or the previous generation had in terms of pension, in terms of longevity of the job. Even though we’re still benefiting from this so-called wonderful standard of living, it isn’t all that great. It isn’t better than it was before. Even in our own system.

We’re living in a third world. And I’m noticing that as the people on top, I’m reminded of something that I was told where any injustice that lacks utility is not a logical act. Any inequality that lacks utility is unjust. And with those two together: I can’t see how although America has progressed—and I’ll even go along and say when the tide rises all boats rise—but I’m not willing to say that because we have a bigger boat, we’re justified in having that boat.

As people of faith in a broader sense, or just people of conscience, do we say that I’m going to stick to my money before I stick to my neighbor? I can’t make that assertion.

At one time I was for free trade, but I see the harm that unfair restrictions for example, the products that come down from Canada without any restrictions competing with our people here. I see impacts on families.

So I don’t know. I think there’s a legitimate thing that people say about protectionism. Again, maybe a selfish kind of thing, but then, isn’t kind of caring for your family a good Christian or faith-based thing to do?

We keep talking about us and them, you know. We’re on this planet where we’re all human beings. They’re all our brothers and sisters, you know. So it’s selfish. To me it seems selfish of us to live like we’re living and let over 20% of the people in the world exist on less than a dollar a day. I think that we need to do something.

The one place that I see some hope, is these non-governmental organizations that are working around the world, kind of grassroots movements. They had a conference in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in 1992, and out of that came the Earth Charter.

Yes, it certainly seems unfair to deliberately take away from others. In other words a nation and certainly a government is responsible to its people in agreement that we may all be human beings.

We do have obligations, I think, to those who are closest to us as a nation. Obviously there’s a loyalty there and we want to make sure that we take care of our own. And I’m sensitive to that word when I say our own first. That is a biblical principle I believe.

Where I would go as a nation, and from a biblical perspective, is to look at the World Trade Organization, and where there are nations in the world who are desirous of being part of the WTO, but they don’t do things in a way that may seem very fair.

And we can use that as leverage and I use China as an example. A nation that would like to become a major player and certainly would like to be a permanent member of WTO.

There are things, from a national perspective, we can almost use as leverage to get them to allow for human rights and other things that I think are Biblically sound concepts.

So we can use trade to promote Biblical aspects, but I too share the difficulty in trying to remedy those differences as you spoke about too, Sheila.

I think another way that faith informs the issues of free trade is that in terms of awareness.

One of the things my faith teaches is the interdependent web of all existence that we’re all connected on this earth. We only have one earth.

And awareness in terms of when I have a cup of coffee in the morning. Where does that coffee come from? You know it makes you think about, Well, it comes from Costa Rica or Brazil. And what effect am I having on those economies? I am just starting to think about some of those issues, I think helps inform us about issues of free trade.

And another thing that faith can provide when we’re thinking about free trade, it’s just a counter-balance to globalization and local capitalism.

I just finished reading Thomas Freedman’s book The Lexus And The Olive Tree, and faith is sort of our olive tree to counterbalance the Lexus, to use his metaphor.

When we look at China though and we look at Iraq and you look at economic investment in people and the raising of the standard of living and the empowerment of choice on an economic basis, I think one of the sad opportunities that was missed was an attempt to give that a shot.

We’re willing to with China, which has a horrendous human rights record, but we weren’t willing to do that with Iraq. And I wonder what the morality . . . or how faith helps informs of as to how we might make those choices? Is it just because we don’t like Arabs, we don’t like Muslims? But the Chinese are some how acceptable?

You see, I would’ve liked to . . . That’s another standard of peace. When we saw the bankrupt nature of sanctions, they just weren’t working. Maybe there were other alternatives. And I know it’s problematic because of who Saddam Hussein is. But at the same time if a carrot or a stick works in one place, why can’t we decide how it can work as a policy that covers a broader number of nations? At least it wouldn’t seem to me like this is a war against Islam. It would seem broader.

The concept of democratic peace is pretty much established in history. Democracies do not go to war against one another. And that stood up over several hundred years in historical records.

Democracies recognized that allowing people to become who they are through freedom, through human rights, through education, through interaction with other nations, through trade, recognize that this is sound principle, and dare I say it, a godly way of living, of fulfilling life.

I think from a Christian perspective, promoting democracies in nations is a sound, historically sound principle for good government and allowing people to become who they are. And the beauty of that from a faith-based perspective is that it allows people to choose how they want to worship. That to me is important.

The interest base from a national perspective—whether a nation is a democracy or not—is significant also. We just tend to get along with other democracies. We have something in common. There’s something to that that stands up to the test of times. So I think that’s why I think we promote democracies.

It comes back to what we want vs. what we need. And I think that we do need to take care of the needs. But we really need to look at the wants and the wants of the rest of the world that probably has more needs.

One of the things in my mind, whether we’re talking about the economy, or free trade or bringing the rest of the world up so that all the boats are afloat, I think there is one common thing that would change that and that’s basically common to all of us who have faith and that’s love.

When we choose to love our brother, wherever they reside on this planet, then we will find ways, and there will be ways made to us that we have no knowledge of now, because of that. So to me the divine economy is based on love.

Getting back to free trade and the fact that if we open our borders to all sorts of products, people, ideas, then we do have to have a relationship with those people.

That is not political, necessarily, and it’s not necessarily religious and it’s not necessarily governmental, but you do have to exchange ideas.

That’s how so many of the ideas have come across the world on ships and trains and planes. It has nothing to do with governments. It’s trading stuff. And as far back as any civilization ever, you find seashells in the middle of Nebraska. And they got there from trading, the Indians traded with one another all the time, they traded ideas, and they traded . . . but they had to have a relationship with each other.

And it’s a lot harder to kill somebody you know, than it is to kill somebody you don’t know. And I think that would make it a lot harder to have wars, if we had relationships with all these people.

The thing I want to say the most is, as we’ve talked about all these global wonderful things, is just the importance of personal responsibility, for each person to take the responsibility for themselves, for their families, then for their neighborhoods, for their community. There’s a real sense on that ownership of what you can do.

And you know it’s been wonderful to sit here and talk about how we can solve the problems of the world, and love is the key to it.

But we need to start with really governing ourselves, and our own relationship to our God and to our families and to our neighbors.

We have to remember one thing: free trade is predicated on economics. That’s the only reason why we do open our borders for free trade. It’s because it is economically advantageous to us.

So therefore, if we see where we can make the money bucks, we’ll go over there and we’ll say, Hey, I’ll forget what you did, you ran over this guy with a tank, but I’ll forget about that if you let me open a McDonalds in your back yard.

So we have to realize what’s really happening. We like to camouflage a lot of the things we do with words and this and that. But the bottom line is economics. I don’t care what we say, we can put it behind the Bible, we can put it behind this and that, but as far as this country is concerned economics is the only bottom line thing we’re talking about.